Fabric vs. iDeals

Last updated April 2026

iDeals is a virtual data room for locking down documents during high-stakes transactions. Fabric is an AI workspace for making your content useful every day. iDeals controls who sees what. Fabric understands what you have. One is built for a deal that ends. The other is built for knowledge that lasts.

Comparison table

What is iDeals?

iDeals is a virtual data room provider that's been serving the M&A and due diligence market since 2008. You upload confidential documents, set granular permissions down to the page level, invite counterparties, and track every interaction through detailed audit trails. Watermarking, fence view, remote shred, and access revocation give you control over what happens to your documents after they're shared. The Q&A module structures communication between deal parties. iDeals is used by investment banks, PE firms, law firms, and corporations during fundraising, M&A, IPOs, and legal proceedings. Pricing is quote-based and starts around $500/month. There's no free plan and no self-service signup. You go through sales.

What is Fabric?

Fabric is an AI workspace that combines file storage, note-taking, search, tasks, collaboration, and publishing. The Fabric Memory Engine automatically extracts, enriches, and maps relationships between everything you save. Fabric also includes publishing with analytics, password protection, and stakeholder-specific links. Where iDeals locks documents down for a transaction, Fabric makes documents useful for ongoing work.

Key differences

Documents you control vs documents you understand

iDeals is built around access control. Who can see this document? Which pages? Can they print? Can they download? For how long? Every interaction is logged. The documents themselves are treated as static objects behind a permission layer. iDeals doesn't know what's inside them. It knows who looked at them.

Fabric is built around understanding. Every file you save is automatically extracted, enriched, and indexed. The AI maps relationships between documents. You can ask questions across your entire library. Search works by meaning, not just keywords. The documents aren't static objects. They're part of a knowledge base that gets more useful the more you add to it.

Built for a deal vs built for ongoing work

iDeals is project-based. You open a data room for a transaction. Documents go in. Counterparties review them. The deal closes (or doesn't). The data room closes. It's infrastructure for a finite process.

Fabric is persistent. Your content lives there permanently, growing and connecting over time. There's no "room" that opens and closes. Your documents, research, meeting notes, and published materials are all part of one library you work with continuously.

Sharing and analytics

Both products track who views your shared content. The implementations reflect different priorities.

iDeals tracks at extreme granularity: page-level view time, print and download activity per user, IP addresses, session duration. Audit trails are designed to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements during high-stakes transactions.

Fabric's publishing analytics show who viewed, when, and how long they spent, with stakeholder-specific links. The analytics are designed for ongoing content sharing: proposals, portfolios, investor updates, client deliverables. Less granular than iDeals' page-level tracking, but integrated into a workspace you use every day rather than a temporary deal room.

Security and compliance

iDeals is ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certified. It offers page-level permissions, dynamic watermarking, fence view (prevents screenshots), remote shred (delete documents from downloaded copies), and full audit trails. For M&A due diligence, IPO preparation, and legal proceedings where regulatory compliance is non-negotiable, this infrastructure is purpose-built.

Fabric uses AES-256 encryption at rest and SSL in transit, and is CASA Tier 2 compliant. It's secure, but it's not built to satisfy the specific compliance requirements of regulated deal processes. If you need fence view, remote shred, and page-level audit trails for a transaction, iDeals or a comparable VDR is the appropriate tool.

AI

iDeals has AI-powered redaction for removing sensitive information from documents before sharing. There's no AI assistant, no content understanding, no semantic search, and no way to ask questions about your documents.

Fabric's AI understands your entire content library. It answers questions, summarises documents, transcribes audio and video, maps relationships between content, and works across all file types. If you're doing due diligence and want to ask "what do these contracts say about termination clauses?" across a hundred documents, Fabric can answer that. iDeals can tell you who viewed each contract. Different questions, different tools.

Pricing

iDeals doesn't publish pricing. Quotes are based on pages uploaded, users invited, and project duration. Based on user reports: $500-1,000/month minimum for small deals, $2,000-5,000/month for mid-size transactions, $5,000-10,000+/month for large M&A. Enterprise contracts for firms running multiple deals can reach $50,000-100,000 annually. There's no free plan and no self-service trial.

Fabric includes publishing with analytics at every tier. [Insert Fabric pricing details.] For everyday content sharing, collaboration, and knowledge management, Fabric costs a fraction of what a VDR charges.

When to use each

Use Fabric if you need to store, understand, search, and share content as part of ongoing work. You want AI that knows what's in your documents. You need publishing with analytics for proposals, portfolios, and client deliverables. You want notes, collaboration, semantic search, and a spatial canvas alongside your shared content. Your sharing needs are persistent, not transactional.

Use iDeals if you're running a formal M&A transaction, IPO, or legal proceeding that requires ISO 27001/SOC 2 compliance, page-level audit trails, dynamic watermarking, fence view, and remote shred. The deal has a defined start and end date, involves external counterparties who need controlled access to confidential documents, and the regulatory environment demands enterprise-grade data room infrastructure.

Use both. Some teams use iDeals for the formal deal room and Fabric as the workspace where they prepare, research, and organise the materials that go into it. Fabric is where you understand your documents. iDeals is where you lock them down for the transaction.

Why people move from iDeals to Fabric

The deal ended but the work didn't. iDeals data rooms close when the transaction closes. The documents, the context, the relationships between files don't carry forward. Fabric keeps everything in a persistent, searchable library.

They wanted to understand their documents, not just control access. iDeals tracks who viewed a document. Fabric reads it, indexes it, and lets you ask questions about it. For teams that need to work with their content, not just share it, the difference matters.

The cost didn't make sense outside of deals. Paying $2,000+/month for document sharing is justified during a high-stakes transaction. For everyday content sharing and collaboration, it's not. Fabric covers ongoing needs at a different price point.

They needed a workspace, not a vault. Notes, AI, semantic search, collaboration, spatial canvases, tasks. iDeals does none of that. Fabric does all of it.

FAQs

Does Fabric have the same security certifications as iDeals?

Fabric uses AES-256 encryption and is CASA Tier 2 compliant. It does not have ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification. For regulated transactions requiring those specific certifications, iDeals or a comparable VDR is the appropriate choice.

Can Fabric replace iDeals for M&A due diligence?

For formal due diligence with page-level audit trails, dynamic watermarking, fence view, and remote shred, no. Those are VDR-specific features for regulated deal processes. For the broader work of organising, understanding, and collaborating on deal materials before and after the transaction, Fabric covers that.

Is Fabric free?

Fabric has a free tier with limited storage and AI. iDeals has no free plan and requires a sales conversation to get started.

Does iDeals have AI?

iDeals has AI-powered redaction for sensitive information. There's no AI assistant, no semantic search, and no way to ask questions about your documents.

Which is cheaper?

Fabric, by a significant margin. iDeals is priced for high-stakes transactions where the cost is justified by deal value. Fabric is priced as a workspace for ongoing use. They serve different needs at different price points.

Can I use Fabric to prepare materials for an iDeals data room?

Yes. Fabric is well-suited for organising, searching, and understanding the documents that will eventually go into a formal data room. Use Fabric to do the thinking. Use iDeals to do the deal.